I'm testing out fastpages - a great new tool that (among other things) let's you write blog posts in Jupyter and host them for free using Github pages. This post documents how I moved my past blog posts across from wordpress (datasciencecastnet.home.blog) into fastpages.

The Steps¶

These are the basic steps I followed:

Set up a fastpages repository by following the instructions (https://fastpages.fast.ai/fastpages/jupyter/2020/02/21/introducing-fastpages.html)
Export XML from wordpress. I used the standard process, Tools -> Export -> Export All (https://wordpress.org/support/article/tools-export-screen/) to get an XML file that contains all my posts etc.
Convert the XML export to markdown. I used https://github.com/lonekorean/wordpress-export-to-markdown. I had to install npm with ‘sudo apt install npm’ and then I placed my XML file in the same folder as the script and ran ‘npx wordpress-export-to-markdown’, following the prompts to create files with the right date format. I chose not to place them in separate folders, and didn’t save images scraped from the post body since this caused an error. You can drop these markdown files into the _posts folder of your fastpages repository - they'll appear as soon as it finished building!

Some optional extra steps to deal with images:

Export the media from my wordpress. The markdown files link to images hosted by wordpress, but these seem to load really slowly. Exporting the images and saving them in a 'wordpress_export' folder within the 'images' folder of the fastpages blog let's you have full control over the images and hosting.
Change the image references in the markdown posts. There are various ways you could do this, but since this post is a jupyter notebook let's do it with a bit of python code!

# Get a list of posts
import glob
posts = glob.glob('../_posts/*.md')

# replace the image URLs to point to our new images
for post in posts:
    s = open(post, 'r').read()
    s = s.replace('https://datasciencecastnethome.files.wordpress.com', '{{ site.baseurl }}/images/wordpress_export')
    f = open(post, 'w')
    f.write(s)
    f.close()

Push your changes, and wait a few minutes for the build process to finish. Then check out your shiny new blog!